usmeteora comments on “Unemployment in the U.S. Is Falling, So Why Isn’t Pay Rising?”

I get what youre saying logicially and in general I don’t disagree with you, but I want to pose a new way of thinking about this that may be unique to times previous and see what people think, because its a forming idea in my head, and I’m not sure its somethign I’ve settled on yet in general

With software engineering specifically, given the amount of people who have access to the internet, lets say like unemployed young men in theirs 20s working in the food industry or something, working part time and play video games for 40 hrs a week. If you have access to an xbox, then you have access to free online courses to learn machine learning, intro to programming, the entire internet where you can openly asked the internet questions and try to figure out a skill thats valuable and in software specifically, have multiple free venues of learning it.

But theres a lot of people who don’t do that and don’t take advantage of it, but also protest wages in silicon valley. There are people who work at coffee shops 20 hrs a week by choice, and go hiking by choice and had access to the same resources everyone else did, and came even alot from middle class to upper class homes, but don’t want to learn high demand skills, and in fact protest them.

in this case, I’d say the pay is not only high enough, but it’s so high they dislike the fact that not doing the work to get those high paying jobs is decreasing the quality of their life relative to everyone else around them.

obviously outliers exist, but what is it about software development, that, atleast for the population who can afford internet, and video game consoles, makes it so elite people arent motivated to learn.

I think some people don’t want to learn or put in the effort, but also don’t want to experience the reduction in quality of life as a result of other people putting in the effort.